And baby makes 3 even if you're gray

FOUR years ago, my brother, then 62, announced he was going to have a baby.

His wife, in her 30s, was childless. She'd long wanted a child, but my brother, who had a 26-year-old son, feared he was too old.

Now, he'd decided to for it.

What I remember most clearly from our conversation was jealousy -- not the sibling rivalry that had dogged his days and mine but something larger. A railing-at-the-gods kind: Why should he still be able to make babies when I, half a decade younger and much more of a nurturer, was doomed to post-menopausal shutdown?

So it was with a delight bordering on the passionate that I heard about the 59-year-old British woman who gave birth to twins by virtue of eggs fertilized by her younger husband and implanted by Italian doctors.

And it was with an indignation bordering on the painful that I learned she was the object of ethical debate centering on whether a woman that old ought to be a parent.

Who debated the ethics of my brother's having a baby -- little Alex, now nearly 4 -- who will finish eighth grade when his father is 75 and graduate from college when his father is 83?

I heard little debate when, in the early 1980s, the spectacular rates of divorce and remarriage began to make it common for men with children in their 20s to start new families.

When these men sired their new children, their reproductive feat was celebrated, not criticized -- and then emulated.

Now, medical technology enables women -- just a few, all apparently super-healthy and super-rich -- to have babies late in life. Suddenly, there's a hue and cry.

Older mothers! They'll be in nursing homes before the kids are out of school! They'll be dead! Even if they live until their children reach adulthood, their offspring will be psychologically damaged.

If a child is going to have an older parent, an older mother is a better bet than an older father. The statistics say she's going to live seven years longer than he.

Will she be in a nursing home while her child is small? Highly unlikely. The average age of women seeking babies through the new technology is 51. The average age of people entering nursing homes is nearly 85.

There is no evidence in the psychological literature to indicate that older parents are unfit parents.

In fact, some evidence suggests that because they tend to bring economic tranquillity and emotional stability to baby-rearing, they are better parents.

Such advantages, not to mention the blissful enthusiasm for parenthood that is the hallmark of most graying mothers and fathers, may outweigh drawbacks associated with anxiety about health and stamina.

Women of a certain age have always helped rear America's children. How many children are being reared by grandmothers? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Are the grandmothers too old for the job? Should we take the children from them? Of course not.

Some critics maintain that when older people have babies, they disrupt the proper order of things -- that there is a time to procreate and a time to give it up.

OK, but only if all those potential daddies in their 50s and 60s are willing to give up the privilege, too. And you can bet they never will.

To criticize older women, who are having their shot at it, while admiring or accepting the profusion of older daddies is blatant sexism.

Just because science makes something possible doesn't mean it's unethical. Think of the heart surgery that has helped millions of people, many of them older daddies, live beyond the time that nature might have granted them.

Linda Wolfe is author of the forthcoming "Double Life," about Sol Wachtler, the former chief judge of New York.